Office Hours – June 16, 2017

Recording of Office Hours hosted by Chris Davis on June 16, 2017.

Transcript

Chris Davis:I’m so glad you brought that up, because now I know going forward I’m not going to have that as an option. You know what, I could do header slide … No, I don’t want to do that. If I paste it here, it should [inaudible 00:00:16]. All right great, right? Now everybody’s protected. Okay. This is a very important question about captcha. Let me read through it. Let me make it bigger for everybody. If Mark [00:00:30] was on, that’s what he would tell me, Chris, make it bigger. She has a couple questions. One is advice on forms with captcha.

It’s a two fold question, advice on captcha and how to choose a third party tool for them. They tie into each other because what Michelle wants to do is she wants to prevent from getting these bots and spammers from filling out her [00:01:00] forms, because they just take up space in your database, you’re paying for each one of those emails, and she wants to use captcha, but look what happens when she uses captcha. There it is. It uglifies it. Nobody wants a form that looks like that. I would agree with you. She’s got another form in her email with it [00:01:30] vertical.

So the question becomes if I don’t want spammers to be able to access my form but captcha makes it look, I think your copy … yeah, I’m just missing your screenshot, but the captcha makes it ugly, what do I do? There’s two options. One is actually the topic that I wanted to show you all today, one is the topic of running an engagement automation. This engagement [00:02:00] automation will tag email addresses that have not taken any action. What you can do is after 30 days, you can automatically delete those emails. So it acts as an automatic purge automation, and it can be your first line of defense. For some people, that may make them nervous, like oh 30 days, sometimes my people, it takes 30 days, I will make a couple arguments and offer one additional solution.

One argument is if somebody opts into your email list and doesn’t do anything [00:02:30] within the first 30 days, the chances that they’re going to do something going forward are slim to none. It just doesn’t work like that. People just doing get … They don’t re-engage themselves as time goes on. When somebody opts in, they are showing their true intention right at that moment. So if they engage, they intend to engage further. So if that’s still, you don’t believe me, and you’re like no, Chris, you don’t know what you’re talking about, 30 days is too much. I’ll show [00:03:00] you with this engagement automation, you can also tag people at 60 days out. So whatever timeframe you want to give it, just know that within 30 days, you’re paying for those email addresses.

So that’s the way to control it if you wanted to not have to use captcha. You would you a email address come in, and this engagement filter would run, and every 30 days it would say hey, have you done anything, have you done anything, have you done anything, and if it’s no, they’re going to tag [00:03:30] you like, disengaged in 30 days, and you could easily say every month, once a month, maybe the first of the month or maybe the end of the month, you go into your account, and you say okay, what are my non engaged leads looking like, and if they all have really strange addresses and anything like that, you can delete them.

Now, the plus is if you’re using this automation disengagement frequency automation, you’ll also be able to exclude these type of contacts from receiving email, [00:04:00] which means you won’t have a bounce rate, which means your deliverability is going to skyrocket, which means ActiveCampaign is going to really enjoy sending your emails. When ActiveCampaign really enjoys sending your emails, they tend to land in the inbox, not the spam box, not the promotional folder.

Okay? So many many reasons to do that, but that’s if we wanted to not use captcha and use this beautiful form. By the way, Michelle, great job on this form. It looks really really good. If she wanted to use this form and just [00:04:30] remove captcha, you would just need this automation. So that’s one.

The second option is what Michelle is asking, and that is from third party form tools. Now, she says her web developer recommended using gravity forms, and she usually hears about thrive and optimize [inaudible 00:04:55] leadpages. This is what you want to look for, Michelle. If you have [00:05:00] a platform that has a two step opt in, which means they have to click a button, and then once they click a button, the pop up comes up where they ask for your email address, that’s going to lower your spam count. That is most definitely going to lower it because a lot of these spam addresses, they’re robots, and robots can’t click buttons. So they’re just going throughout the internet submitting forms. That’s it. So if you have a naked form on your site, a form is just a form that when you go to a site, it just shows, [00:05:30] they can submit those, and that’s what the captcha is for because if a bot is going and submitting, they have to click I am not a robot, and then it’s like another thing that shows select the pictures. No bot can do that. That’s the whole point of captcha, but like you mentioned, it makes things ugly.

So if that’s the case, if naked forms are always being filled out continuously online, there’s really nothing you can do about except this engagement frequency [00:06:00] automation I told you about and implement a two step, but even a two step doesn’t always work because the form technically is still existing on your site and the bots can see it. All right?

This is not limited to ActiveCampaign, everybody. WordPress users have this issue. Any platform that has forms is going to have this issue at some point in time, so I don’t want you to think you’re doing anything wrong or there’s something wrong with you, Michelle. It’s just the way that it [00:06:30] is. So let’s talk about the alternatives.

I’m going to talk about the ones that you listed. Gravity forms, hands down, is probably the most powerful integration web form tool that you can use. It creates custom fields in ActiveCampaign that don’t exist if they exist on a gravity form and not in your account, you can tag based on answers. You can additional display thank you pages, can additional display input fields, so if somebody selects hey, I’m a dog owner, [00:07:00] you could then have a field pop up that says great, what’s the name of your dog, but if they don’t select dog owner, they never see that field. So gravity forms is huge. If you use gravity forms, you could use a plug in like, I think it’s called honey pot or something like that, honey pot spam, spam protection. Let me see. Honey pot, I think it is. It’s been [00:07:30] awhile since I’ve … I think it’s this. Honey pot. I don’t know. I thought I could pull it up. Oh here it is, gravity forms, honey pot. Form setting. It looks like it may be built in to gravity forms, which will help. Look at that, announcing the gravity forms zero spam plugin. This is 2014.

So anyways, I know traditionally gravity forms are known to being able to decrease your spam. So [00:08:00] it looks like they’ve got a honey pot field that you can hide. Anyways. So look into that. That’s what you want to look for in gravity forms. Let me go back to your other list. When we look at thrive themes, thrive themes out of all of these is the cheapest and most powerful solution, hands down. It can’t do all of the form functionality as gravity forms. Gravity forms is a true form builder. Thrive leads is a conversion platform. Right, a conversion tool. So everything that they give you is going to revolve [00:08:30] around converting leads online, hence thrive leads. What they’ll allow you to do is have that pop up. They’ll have many ways for you to capture leads, and I will admit, a lot of the users from thrive, I haven’t met too many of them that complain about spam religiously, so that is most definitely an option. Optimize press is going to be probably the oldest of all. It has definitely been around longer than leadpages and thrive, and [00:09:00] it is a WordPress plugin that you’ll need to install. Thrive leads is a WordPress plug in, too, but optimizepress is a plug in and a theme depending how you work it.

I will admit, most people love it starting out, but as your needs grow, and your business matures and so does your marketing, you start to run into limitations with optimizepress. That’s the only gripe that I’ve heard about it. Leadpages, [inaudible 00:09:27]. It’s a solid [00:09:30] platform. It’s a solid platform. Again, it’s like thrive. They have the two step opt in, so you don’t have too many spam emails being submitted through those forms, although it doesn’t hide all of them. Leadpages is going to be the most expensive out of all these. Leadpages is going to be the most expensive. Honestly, if your site is running WordPress, I would be more inclined to use thrive. You’re going to get more for your money. It’s going to be a central location [00:10:00] for you to log in, just as you would update a page on your site, you can then log in and see how your conversion elements are performing.

So that’s my take and recommendation, but you know what, these two are mutually exclusive. Essentially, you would use gravity forms and thrive leads. It wouldn’t be an either or, so I should say mutually inclusive, the bottom three and the top one. You would ideally use [00:10:30] gravity forms for your more complex forms or forms where you’re capturing more information, and then use like thrive leads, optimizepress, and lead pages for forms where you’re just grabbing an email address or whatnot to start the followup process.

That’s really the difference between the two. Now depending on your business, Michelle, and feel free to tell me a little about your business in the chat or let me see this email if you have your [00:11:00] business in the signature. Oh your chat’s not coming through. Yeah, I’m seeing them now. I’m not sure what was happening. But let me see. Michelle, no you used your Gmail. Okay, that’s fine. But yeah, see if you could just highlight it, copy it, and paste it, Michelle, so you don’t have to go through the work of retyping it. [00:11:30] She says for instance, I read in the forms that using gravity forms with the add on for ActiveCampaign makes you miss out on site tracking, and that you would have to add custom Javascript in order to keep that functionality. Now, that is true but that’s not specific to gravity forms. That’s specific to any platform that’s submitting forms on behalf of ActiveCampaign. So that would be true for thrive leads, optimize press, and leadpages. That’s true for any third party. Okay?

So [00:12:00] excuse me, when you use third party tools, unless you’re embedding the ActiveCampaign form on the tool itself, you are not going to activate site tracking on that first submission of their email. However, if they click a link in an email, it is active, so it’s not like it will be deactivated forever. All right, okay. I see. So there’s some stuff here. Let me just make sure. Also [00:12:30] right now, we only need two simple opt in forms, I’m sure we’ll eventually need the ability to create full sales landing pages as well. I don’t know if gravity forms does that, but I know that some of the other tools I mentioned do. Yeah, so that’s what I’m saying. You’ll probably have a mix of both depending on the complexity of your forms. For landing pages and sales pages and all that, I definitely recommend of course, easiest to get started, cheapest is thrive leads, but if you’re familiar with leadpages, optimizepress, they’ll work equally [00:13:00] as good.

Let me see here. All right. So you say, I definitely want captcha no matter what after reading [AC’s 00:13:11] help article and after seeing that someone posted in the Facebook group about [AC 00:13:15] threatening to close their account [inaudible 00:13:20]. Yeah. But again, so remember, Michelle, the best list maintenance that you can do is [00:13:30] the list maintenance you take responsibility for. Here’s what I mean by that. A lot of people leave it up to the tool. This is not specific to ActiveCampaign. I’m just talking marketing automation, email marketing space. If you leave it up to the tool to handle all of your engagement and the level of engagement, you’re always going to end up on the short end of the stick. I learned this the hard way and early when I was using platforms like A Webber, iContact and Mail Chimp, [00:14:00] they’ll let you do anything. They’ll let you do anything you want to. If all you do is look at the charts and say, it got delivered, I only had X amount of bounces, and you’re not proactively monitoring your list and identifying non engaged leads and deleting them, you’re going to get penalized, and you’re going to be like look, I didn’t do anything. I was sending email. Trust me, I’ve done this. I’ve been penalized with practically every platform out there.

I’m not saying that you don’t use captcha, but what I’m saying is even [00:14:30] stronger than captcha is you being proactive in making sure you’re accurately assessing who’s engaging on your list and deleting the people who are not. This is not even a chance. 100% of the time, your deliverability will shoot up, and you will never get “threat.” I don’t know the validity of this threat. It was posted in Facebook. You have to take everything on Facebook with a grain [00:15:00] of salt, regardless if it’s in a group or not. But that’s the only sure way, if you truly value, and you’re truly concerned about it, you have to take engagement into your own hands, use the tool’s features to help you monitor engagement for your list. I just wanted to say that.

Let me see. Yeah, this is true, I’m reaching out because the [00:15:30] setting on your account has unfortunately resulted in another major black list on our network. That means the person has been sending to email addresses that don’t exist. And they keep doing it. At that point, it is on you. Right, you should be looking at your reports anyways. If you look at your reports and see you got 10, 15 bounced email addresses, or these are things that you really should be paying attention to and worrying about. Not you, Michelle, but whoever this person was. All right.

Yeah, see it says the black list [inaudible 00:15:58]. Yeah, [00:16:00] yeah. That’s all the message. All right. Protected deliverability [inaudible 00:16:06]. Yes. [inaudible 00:16:07] okay, so essentially, all of this, this support ticket that you put in here, Michelle, it could be summarized in what I was saying, and yeah, Katrina, if you read what Katrina said, in this engagement manager I’ll show you, but it just goes beyond captcha. Listen, I am a fan of captcha. So let me see. If I’m understanding correctly, in order to create the types [00:16:30] of forms you saw in the screenshot with captcha, in a visually pleasing way, we have to use a third party tool, offer a third party tool. You’re saying thrive is the cheapest and still a comprehensive tool, but the very most robust is gravity forms. Michelle, you got it. You got it.

But I will add to this, gravity forms is for more flexible, more dynamic forms. So here’s the thing. Depending [00:17:00] on your level of technicality, some people use gravity forms for everything. They use gravity forms for their newsletters. They use gravity forms for the contact form, and they use gravity forms for the client intake form. It just simplifies things for them. If that’s the type of setup you want, then you could get gravity forms and just ride with gravity forms. You wouldn’t need thrive. You wouldn’t need optimizepress, you wouldn’t need leadpages. But if you wanted to separate the two now, if you do that, you have to figure out how are [00:17:30] you going to measure the opt in, the conversion rate of your pages, because gravity forms is not going to tell you that. That’s where these landing page platforms start to shine, because they’ll tell you how it’s performing.

Now if we talk about thrive leads, the cool thing about thrive leads is if you’re using WordPress, I’m not sure if you’re using WordPress or not, Michelle, but if you’re using WordPress, you can dictate which [00:18:00] pop up or opt in you want to display based on the category of the blog post. Imagine if I was a style blogger about men and women’s clothing, I could easily say hey, thrive themes, any time the category is women, show them this opt in that says the women’s style guide. But any time the category is male, show them this opt in that says men’s style guide. [00:18:30] So you start to see these conversion specific platforms provide you with more conversion opportunities and functionality than gravity forms. Gravity forms is essentially for collecting data on your website. So ideally you would end up having both. I’m not going to lie to you, you’ll probably end up with both. It’s not uncommon to have gravity forms for your contact forms and then thrive leads or something like that for your lead [00:19:00] gen because who wants to opt in as a contact form. So there’s a great chance you’ll end up with both, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Will thrive leads do the small opt ins I’m wanting so I won’t need gravity forms at all? Yeah, by small opt ins, do you mean just capture the name and email? Let me know what you mean by small opt ins so I know. The in line form with captcha. You won’t have captcha on thrive. In fact, no lead [00:19:30] generation tool is going to have captcha at all. You won’t find one. It’s actually not possible. I’ve never seen it exist on any lead generation tool. Now form building tools like gravity forms and whatnot, yes, yes. They will be on there. Yes, captcha will be on there. No, no, no, that’s not what I’m saying. Why does AC instruct to add captcha if that’s not possible then? I was talking about lead generation tools, thrive [00:20:00] leads, optimizepress, leadpages, click funnels, all of those. They don’t have captcha ability, but we have captcha ability in ActiveCampaign, and so does gravity forms and pretty much any form builder.

So remember, traditionally, the history of captcha is for online forms. When online lead generation came around, [00:20:30] that was post captcha, and that was just one of those features that never made it in. Just for whatever reason, none of the platforms saw fit to use captcha, mainly because it lowers your conversion rate. So if you’re a conversion platform like thrive leads, optimizepress, leadpages, and you’re claiming hey, use our pages for the highest conversion rate, and then you have captcha on there, which is just adding another step for people to opt in while adding a layer of security, [00:21:00] well then, you’re going to have the issue where conversion rate drops, and you can no longer claim that. So what platforms like email marketing platforms have done is that’s where double opt in came from.

So if you truly, if you want ultimate security, you need to be using double opt in and making sure that you’re using form submissions in ActiveCampaign and having a double opt in. Because now, [00:21:30] if a spam address fills out a form, they won’t click a double opt in email, and they’ll never be marked as active. You have at least three layers of protection that you can use from spam bots. Let me see what else.

Michelle, you’re asking, but the lead generation tools without captcha somehow prevent the spambots from filling out the form. Sometimes. I can’t [00:22:00] claim it happens 100% of the time, but I will admit most people who capture leads through thrive themes, I don’t see it often, I don’t work there. When I was at leadpages, I didn’t see it much either, honestly from the customers. I didn’t see people complaining about spam bots a lot at all, but I’ve always heard it. I’ve heard of it from email marketing platforms, and it’s kind of like this, if you had a virus, [00:22:30] this is why a lot of people are like well Macs don’t have viruses. If you’re going to write a virus, you’ve got a higher potential to target PC users because there’s a higher population of them. So if I’m using a bot, I’m probably just focused on web forms instead of trying to customize my code to apply to every lead generation tool, which only is representative of a small portion of the entire pull on the internet.

That’s just the technical backend, and [00:23:00] that analogy between Windows and Mac is probably the most applicable because if you ask any hacker who writes code for virus or whatnot, the main point of a bot is to fill out as many forms as possible. They can’t keep up with all the new technology. It’s not their fault. Captcha bots and captcha forms are some of the oldest technology ever, and the two go hand in hand. All right.

She says she’s been getting spam contact opt [00:23:30] ins like crazy, currently without captcha. Do you use double opt in, Michelle? If you use double opt in, you’re not charged. They show up as … Let me show you. If you’re using double opt in, this is how those contacts are appearing in your account, and feel free to delete them. But you see this. I can go to all. It shows 144. That’s all of my contacts. However, [00:24:00] if I select here and go to active, you’ll see that goes down to 140. This is the number I’m being charged for. All of your bot field, all your bot email addresses or spam email addresses, they’ll who in your all number, but they are not going to show in your active because you have to click a link, you have to click the double opt in link to be active. You have to. Unless they’re in some back door way, some crazy [00:24:30] third party integration or whatnot.

But if you’ve got double opt in on your forms, and you’ve got bots filling out your forms, you don’t have to worry about it because A, they won’t get any email, and B, you’re not paying for them. You’re only paying for active contacts. You’re not paying for all contacts. The difference between active and all is inactive contacts, either people who have not clicked the double opt [00:25:00] in link or contacts who have undeliverable email addresses. Both will result in being inactive, and you will not be charged, although it will show under all contacts as all. We don’t know it’s a bot so what we’re saying is just because the email address is not deliverable doesn’t mean there may not be other data on the contact record that you want. So that’s why we have all contacts. Some people use the CRM, [00:25:30] and they’re not mailing. They’re calling people because they’re capturing their phone number. So in that event, they don’t need to be active, but that’s the difference between all and active.

Yep. Let me just see. Michelle, I hope this is making sense. I don’t want you to be too worried about it, but at the same time, I want to make sure [00:26:00] you get everything I’m saying. I’m just going to read this. She says I don’t have to worry about emails going to people who didn’t double opt in, which means I don’t have to worry about getting a notice from AC for my account to be closed. Well no, you won’t get your account closed, you’ll just get a warning. We’ll never just close your account. You’ll get a warning first. Then we’ll give you some time to adjust. Then it comes down to cleaning the contacts [00:26:30] out regularly, yeah, so I don’t need captcha, just double opt in regularly and regular cleanup.

I would say, I have never used captcha on lead generation forms. I’ve never seen it. Regular contact forms, I have seen it, but I personally think you would be just fine with using double opt in because that will catch all of those spam addresses. But if [00:27:00] you want to use captcha, by all means, use it. I don’t want to dictate your level of comfort. Okay, how about this, Michelle? Maybe you do a split test. One week you run it with just double opt in, and then one week you run it with captcha, and you see the difference, and then you choose, like okay, I liked it better with captcha. The only thing I know about captcha is it lowers the rate of real people submitting [00:27:30] the form. All right.

If so, I don’t need captcha, I don’t need gravity forms or third party tools at all until I need sales pages and other functionality. Yeah, yeah. I mean that is a very true statement. I would personally, like I said, start out with forms on my web, ActiveCampaign forms on my website, double opt in enabled. Just let me show you. Show you something real [00:28:00] quick. When it comes to double opt in on the forms, which is under options, and then the form action, if you go to edit, I just like to remind people this, because this is not the case in all other platforms, you see how I’ve completely edited the email, it doesn’t have the green button, you can adjust this email to look however you want, if you want to add your logo, if you want to design it to your [00:28:30] intent, so it doesn’t have to be like opt in here to give me permission to send me email because you’re now on my list.

It could be very natural, right? Look at this. I even added this test. If you believe that this is a mistake, and you did not intend on subscribing to this list, you can ignore this message, and nothing else will happen. This is all custom. I customized this whole thing. When you go into the link, this is the most important part, the link, you have to have this, confirm [00:29:00] link, personalization tag. As long as that’s in the email, the email can look and read however you like it. So a lot of people deliver their lead magnet in this email. This email is free, everybody. You’re not charged, and you’re not dinged for this email. This auto responder email just goes out, and it doesn’t come back and report bounced. It doesn’t come back and go to the spam folder. It just simply waits for a link click to mark the contact [00:29:30] active or inactive.

So I wanted to point that out so that you know you can customize the double opt in email however you like. Many people just assume you can’t because you can’t do it like this in any other platform easily, as easy as you can in here. Yes. So that’s the answer.

When, as your needs grow and maybe get more complex, then yeah, I would maybe think about adding gravity forms or a lead generation tool, but [00:30:00] without looking at your site or knowing much about your business, I think you’ll be just fine starting out with our forms and using double opt in to keep things nice and clean. All right? All right. That is a great segue into her second question, which is how to handle contacts that come in not through an opt in.

So now, we’ve introduced a third party. I’m just going to stick with your example. I’m setting up [00:30:30] a [inaudible 00:30:31] to create a contact record out of people scheduling appointments and acuity. Great stack there. I love that combo, acuity to ActiveCampaign. It’s very powerful. How do you recommend people handle contacts that come in that we want in the system to track info about but haven’t actually opted in? Do people normally create an automation that emails these contacts with the invitation to opt in or should we only put these contacts in the system that we plan to immediately [00:31:00] market to?

Here’s the most powerful and simple approach. I would have a list for every integration. This is the way to keep things simple. So let’s say I have a master list. Everybody on this master list is going to receive ongoing email communication. But aside from that master list, I have an acuity scheduling list in ActiveCampaign. This [00:31:30] is what I mean. I mean like a real list. I’m not using the word list metaphorically. But if I take another list and copy it, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll copy all of that. And I go here, I would have a list literally called acuity scheduling. Okay?

So now I have a list called acuity scheduling. When I integrate acuity with ActiveCampaign, [00:32:00] all of the contacts are going to be added to my acuity scheduling list. So I know, Michelle, I know that everybody on that list is just for appointment type stuff. I’m not adding them to my master list unless you want to. Unless you want to say, like send out a follow up and say hey, thanks for meeting with me, if you like to get ongoing communication or stay in the loop with [00:32:30] updates or whatnot, click here. Then when they click that link, you can have an automation that moves them from your acuity scheduling list to your master list. You see what I’m saying? But I would keep them separate because you’re right, just because I schedule time doesn’t mean I want to start receiving your newsletter.

Then it says when they do come in, do people create a placeholder list for them because they can’t immediately go, oh yeah, I guess I was ahead of myself. I wouldn’t even [00:33:00] call it a placeholder list, though. It’s literally a group. It’s a group of people who have scheduled time with you. You can also use that list for perhaps retargeting for some reason later. If you have a list of people, for instance, if you have a list of people that have signed up for free consultation. I’m assuming you do services and whatnot. At the point of holiday special, end of the season sale [00:33:30] or whatnot, you could take that list of everybody who’s signed up for a 30 minute consultation and re target those leads online with your promotion. It’s not necessarily a placeholder list. It’s just a group of contacts that have taken a specific action that you can export and act on depending on your marketing needs.

And related to the above questions, what kind of training would you recommend on ActiveCampaign and these [00:34:00] principles in addition going through the videos and articles on ActiveCampaign’s site? This right here, office hours. The two things I would say is office hours and one on one’s. If you haven’t scheduled a one on one, I would definitely claim that. But these office hours, from what I hear, of course, I’m biased, I believe they’re great usage of your time. But no, people who attend these office hours usually send me a message [00:34:30] on Facebook and email or something, thanking me and just letting me know how helpful it’s been.

Katrina, that’s a good one Katrina. Or sometimes I get that. Some people are just on the fence. This is the best way, what you’re doing. Here’s what you’ll find, Michelle. As you continue to use the platform, you’ll start seeing, like [00:35:00] right now, your needs are aligned with other people, and you can see what other people and say wait a minute, let me watch out for that, or this is not right, but then as you get in the app and you start using it, this is crazy, this is what happens, you’ll start having your own needs and issues, right? Then you’ll go looking, and nobody else has it. You’re like wait a minute, are you guys not keeping, you’re scheduling people separate from your master list? [00:35:30] You ask this question, and it’ll be silent. That’s when you start to understand that you have a need specific to your business, and that’s what I love. That’s that turning point. That’s when you really take your marketing to another level because you’ve got specific needs. You’ve got specific issues, and I say all that to say that’s where office hours and one on one trainings start to add the most value. I’m saying [00:36:00] alongside of the podcast, the guides and the videos on the website.

In fact, I don’t know, Michelle, let me know if you knew we had a podcast. This is the ActiveCampaign podcast here. Let me put that in here with the link. All right, let me see. Thanks for the tip with the double opt in link being the download, yes, great. Does clicking the link do both? Yes. It does. Watch this, watch this, watch this. [00:36:30] Let me redirect. See you got me excited just asking. Let me finish your question, or does it only confirm and then send a second email with the download? Let me show you, Michelle.

You have given me new purpose today, Michelle, and that is to equip you with as many tricks of the trade today as possible. Watch this, Michelle. If I go here, and I select opt in confirmation. Yes, [00:37:00] you’re very welcome, Michelle. Any time. Let’s just say I go in here, right, and I have this set up, and it says click here to download the name of your resource, and I could say when you do, you will be providing me with permission to send you updates and ongoing communication. [00:37:30] You can add something like that if you want to be clear. What am I doing wrong? If you want to be clear on what’s going to happen when you click here. We could even give it a little emphasis.

So they’ll click here to download, and when they do, they’ll be providing you with permission to send them updates and ongoing communication. When they click the link, here’s what’s going to happen. If I click done, watch this, watch this. You see it says [00:38:00] opt in confirmation, the email. We just edit it. Look at this, confirmation action. We can show a message, which would take them to the default ActiveCampaign page that says thank you, or we can redirect to a URL. What should this URL be? This URL is the URL of your free offer, whether it’s a PDF or a page that people access. Now, both will happen because when they click the link, Michelle, they’re going to be marked as active. Right when they click [00:38:30] the link, they’re going to be marked as active.

Now you can double up and get double for your trouble or double for their trouble, and send them to a URL of your choice. So they can confirm and download with one link. One link click, they can do both. Yes, right? It’s amazing. It’s great. That’s what it is. If you wanted to, let me see here. You got me going. One more, [00:39:00] I believe you can do this. Please don’t make me into a liar. I believe you can. Let me just see. You can. So the third layer is we can confirm, when they click it, they’re automatically going to be confirmed, and this is how it’s working, Michelle. Any time, this percent confirm link, percentage sign is in an email, it’s going to automatically confirm. Now this merge field is only available in the double opt in email. You can’t send it in a regular automation, so it’s only available [00:39:30] here, so it’s going to opt them in, and then you just saw where we can redirect them to the download, so it can opt them in, and allow them to download, and you can even start an automation, add a tag, remove a tag. You can do all sorts of things all on that one link click. All on that one link click.

I’m telling you, you won’t find this anywhere else. So yes, just so you have all of that at your [00:40:00] disposal to use it as you will, but use it wisely, use it responsibly. That’s our thing. Automate responsibly here. Yes, it is. It really is. I’m glad you asked those questions because those are very very good questions. I got to go into a little bit of nerd history with captcha, so you all know where that came from. Michelle, listen, have an acuity list [00:40:30] and have all of your people subscribe to that.

You know what, I’ve got to give you one of these, I’m going to do it quiet, but I’ve got to give you one of these, I’m clapping if you can’t hear, because you took the time to think forward. I can’t tell you how many people just add those acuity scheduling people straight to their list and start marketing to them as if they gave them permission to start sending them offers and promotions, and that’s the quickest way to hit spam, [00:41:00] hit the spam folder and be marked as abusive. So I’m glad you were at least thinking through it and saying you know what, these are different contacts, right? If they scheduled some time with me, that’s totally different than if they opt in on my website for something free. So that level of thinking that you’re doing, Michelle, is going to serve you well as you continue to learn use the platform.

So let me equip you all with this [00:41:30] automation. We’ve got a blog post on it if you would like to read through the blog post. I’m going to walk through it a little bit for you all. What this essentially is doing, this was shared by one of our own, Matt Fox, in fact, I interview Matt Fox on this one. He talked about building membership sites and delivering lead magnets, so I’ll put [00:42:00] that in there, too. Oh yeah, you’re very welcome. You’re very welcome, Michelle. So just some resources in there to take your time and go through, but essentially, let’s talk about this automation and what it’s going to do. I have a bit of a change to this, but I’ll let you download this one as is.

But what it’s going to do is this. It’s going to look for any time someone opens or reads an email. What it [00:42:30] does is it’s going to exit this automation, but essentially, it’s going to remove any tags that say you haven’t taken action in 30 days, you haven’t taken action in 90 days. Whatever those tags are, it’s going to remove them. That’s one automation. Now the second automation is this automation right here that you’re seeing, and that is an automation that they’re added to when a contact is added to your database, they’re added to that automation, and then they wait 30 days, and after 30 days, they get the tag that [00:43:00] says they haven’t responded.

Here’s what it looks like. It’s so hard to explain this stuff without visuals. Look at this. I haven’t done this in a while. Let’s say you have one automation, and here’s another one. What’s really happening is this. It’s like a cycle. It’s like a cycle. [00:43:30] They’re doing this. I would like to flip this. Does anybody know how to do that? Format, arrange, and flip. Nope, don’t want to do it that way, I want to flip it that way. All right. So it’s like this. You have list A, and what list A is doing is it’s just waiting … Okay. [00:44:00] Contacts added. Then it waits 30 days for engagement. I’ll say waits X days for engagement. Then it applies non engagement tags. Why did I get [00:44:30] this extra … Anyway, I don’t know what that is. This is very ugly. What just happened? Key note is fighting me today. Oh I know, I got to do this. Sorry. Sorry, everybody. I got caught up with formatting, formatting woes. This looks ugly now.

All right, that’s what list A is going to do. All contacts are added to this list. All [00:45:00] contacts added upon opt in. Okay. They’re all added to this. The minute they exist in your account, they’re added to this automation. Oops, [inaudible 00:45:14]. The automation triggers when someone’s added. Trigger is when a contact is [00:45:30] added. Okay. It doesn’t have to be opt in. They just have to be added.

So automation A has a trigger when a contact is added. Then it waits, it just waits for a predetermined amount of time, 30 days, applies a tag, then it waits for 60 days, applies a tag, waits for 90 days, applies a tag. So you’re just in this automation, you’re just going 30, 60, 90. It’s applying the tags. Now what happens is in automation B, what [00:46:00] it does is it triggers is any open or click. So essentially what I’m saying is any engagement, any engagement this automation is going to trigger, and what it’s going to do is remove you from automation A, and then it’s going to remove all non engaged [00:46:30] tags.

So essentially, we have it’s talking … Where did it go? All right, so it’s talking to this one, and this automation is talking to that one. Okay? No, in fact, this automation is just, it’s actually alone. The contacts are being added. Contacts are being added here. [00:47:00] So the contacts get added to this one. So they’re in here. Right, they’re in here, and if they stay in here, they’re just going to keep going, wait 30 days, they’re going to get a tag, wait 60 days they’re going to get a tag, wait 90 days, they’re going to get a tag. At any point, if they take an action by clicking or open, this automation is going to remove them from here.

So now, let’s say I was in this automation, and I was waiting, and it’s been 28 days, [00:47:30] and two more days, I would have satisfied the criteria of waiting 30 days and got a tag, but since I opened an email, this automation triggers and removes me from this automation, hence, I never get that tag.

The same can be said if I was at 59 days. If I was at 59 days, then I would have a tag on my record that says I haven’t engaged in 30 days, and tomorrow would be 60 days, so I would get a tag for 60 days non engagement, [00:48:00] but if I open or click an email, this automation is going to remove me from here. It’s going to remove me from here, so now at 59, I got removed, so I never get the 60 day tag, and it’s also going to remove all non engaged tags, so now it’s going to remove my 30 day non engaged tags. You see what I’m saying?

Now this automation is just making sure, it’s removing me from here from getting all of those engagement tags. You’ll see this in effect [00:48:30] when you have, let’s say you’ve gone on a hiatus for six months, pretty much all the leads in your database will have like a 90 day tag. Then you send a new email. You send a broadcast saying hey everybody, I’m back, sorry for the hiatus, everybody that opens or clicks that email, now you remove all those non engaged tags, and it’s like a resurrection, like now they’re alive again, and they’re not disengaged.

Then if you start sending for a couple months consistently, [00:49:00] and you see that people still have the 90 day tag, then you know that’s probably a dead lead. You probably lost them, and you’re paying for a dead lead. The last thing this is going to do, it’s going to add them back to automation. Automation A. Okay, so that’s that. Okay?

So you’re in here, you got added, it’s been [00:49:30] 32 days, so you have a 30 day non engagement tag, and what happens is you opened our click, and we remove you from this automation, we remove your tag, and we wait a day. Wait one day. We’re going to wait a day, and then we’re going to add them back to this automation. That’s going to happen every time they open a email. So even if it’s been two days. It doesn’t matter. We’re still going to remove [00:50:00] them from automation, remove all tags. They won’t have two tags, but they’ll remove them. Wait a day, then add them back to automation. It got really loud really quick. That’s what’s going to happen. You set these two automations up, and you never touch them again.

Listen, these are two automations that truly are set it and forget it. You never have to revisit these because when you go into, look at this, when you go into your ActiveCampaign account, [00:50:30] all you have to do … Let me see here. All right. Let me just go here. All you have to do is go to your contacts and perhaps manage tags, and you can easily see, right, non engaged for 30 days, you’ll be able to see all the contacts from here. [00:51:00] If you have your 30, 60, 90, they’ll all display nicely, and you’ll get a nice shot of where all your contacts are at. I know some people that set this up in stages, so they have a pipeline under deals. They have a pipeline called engaged leads, like if I had a pipeline and called it engaged, lead engagement. They have things like this. [00:51:30] Watch this. Come on. Haven’t engaged in 30 days. All right. They have them just like this. Let me do it like this so I’m not going slow. What was that? Engaged in 60 days. Right? [00:52:00] Then this one could be haven’t engaged in 90 days.

What will happen is instead of just supplying a tag, I could then add them to these stages. Then instead of it says remove from all non engaged tags, it could say remove from stage. Then when they get the tag, they’re added back to the stage and whatnot or you could just have a stage that’s literally called engaged. [00:52:30] Engaged. Why not? Why not have a stage that says engaged?

Now you can see the flow. You’ll be able to see the flow. You’ll be able to see like if I have a thousands leads in my contact, I mean a thousand contacts in my database, maybe 850 of them are engaged. Then 50 of them haven’t engaged in 30 days. Then 20 of them haven’t engaged in 60 days. Then 80 of them haven’t engaged in 90 days. I’ll be able to see that flow and say hey look, how did I lose these people? [00:53:00] You’ll be able to adjust your marketing. I’ll just say that. This is a nice visual way to see it.

Like I said if you don’t have the [inaudible 00:53:11], you can get the same impact from your tags. If you named all of your, if I said engaged, you see I have not engaged in 30 days, not engaged in 60 days. See that? So I can see the same thing. It will be 90, 120, whatever, and you can see where the numbers are. [00:53:30] I’ll give you a nice tip. If you take a screenshot, or you put these numbers in an Excel sheet, before you send an email, like a campaign, this is another great barometer of how effective your email is. Imagine if you had a non engaged 90 days, and you had 100 people in there, you put that in your Excel sheet, and you’re keeping documentation, [00:54:00] the name of the email, the date that you sent it, how many people were 90 day non engaged, how many people were 60 day, how many people were 30 days.

You send the email, you come back a week, and then you look at these same numbers, and you jot them down. What if you’re not engaged by 100 drops to 10? Now you know that that email that you sent was responsible for reengaging 90 leads, 90 leads. That’s the power. Listen, that’s the power when you start taking into your hands, [00:54:30] monitoring your own list and going beyond what’s default in the application. I hope that made sense. I hope that helps you all. These were great questions, and I hope I provided some good answers for you all, and it was fun. It was fun. It brought us right til one o’clock, which is the closing bell for us. I just wanted to thank you all … okay, thank you great, Michelle. [00:55:00] Katrina, thank you. Thank you, everybody. Even our viewers who are just window shopping. We welcome you as well, and I’m grateful for you, too. Thank you all for listening. Thank you for the questions and the jokes, and yeah.

We do this every week, twice, Tuesday at 10 a.m. Central and Friday at one p.m. Central, and I would love to be your guide from the side. Continue to aid [00:55:30] you with whatever you need going forward. All right. Thanks, Chris, can I hire you to lay out my whole plan? Oh man. You know what, I don’t know if you can hire me, but I can definitely help. I can definitely help you. Seriously, I really can.

You know what, everybody, we’re not limited to office hours. I’m also [00:56:00] very active in our Facebook group. You can send me a message on Twitter. I’m in the space everybody. I’m just here to help you all. When I’m here, I’ve got these resources, and I use them to the best of my ability. Dawn, no sad face, Dawn, no sad face. And you all have access, cdavis@activecampaign.com, any questions, email me. I can promise you, some of the questions may [00:56:30] take me awhile to get to because I’m the director, I’m busy, but I do get them, and I respond to them. I’m very much engaged, and I want to see you all succeed.

Again, thank you so much. I hope to see you next week hopefully on Tuesday 10 o’clock, 10 a.m. Central, register, get the reminder. Any questions that you have, keep them coming, and I’ll keep answering them to help you guys plow forward. Have a great weekend. Have a safe weekend. For those of you who are [00:57:00] celebrating your fathers, brothers, husbands, sons, cousins, uncles, tell them, give them an extra hug for Father’s Day and let them know they’re appreciated as it is Father’s Day weekend here in America. All right, everybody, enjoy yourselves. Relax. Thank you, Dawn, thank you so much. Like I said, safe weekend, and hopefully see you all next week.

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